One Year Down

Last Friday marked the one-year anniversary of my last day at Fantasy Flight Games, and my first day of full-time freelancing. I made the decision to be a freelancer out of a desire to work on more games, and more different types of games, in a more creative set of roles, with a wider variety of people, than a full-time job at FFG allowed.

And it worked, on all of those counts. The most incredible has been on the “wider variety of people” front. FFG, with all of its licensors and foreign co-publishers, is far from a hermetic environment, but I’ve worked with, or have plans to work with, people I didn’t know existed at this time last year. And pretty much without exception, they’re awesome people.

I’ve read — and my experience this past year bears it out — that while people tend to be able to accomplish less in a day than they think they ought to be able to, the converse is true for a year. That is, people tend to be able to get more done in a year than they ever would have expected. This last year, the number of days when the end of the day came around with the day’s to-do list about half crossed-off (or worse) is pretty staggering. But at the same time, I can’t think of any deadlines I blew in any serious way, and I have a pretty significant list of projects completed, and published.

The downside of freelancing seems obvious: Less reliable finances. And that’s true… sort of. I can’t find the article now, but a couple of years ago I remember reading something Matt Forbeck wrote on the subject of freelancing, in comparison to holding down a traditional job. You never know, he said, when your day job’s going to evaporate in a layoff, a merger, or some similar cataclysm. Especially these days. Day jobs seem permanent, but it’s an illusion. Matt said he preferred knowing right where the wolf was all the time, right outside his door. He’d rather dispense with the illusion of permanence and deal with the reality that there are no guarantees.

His observation about being able to see the wolf is true. At any given time, I know right which week the wolf is standing on, the week when, if no new gigs land between now and then, there will be no more money. (I have similar clarity about the end of my mortgage, I suppose, but there are about 28 years in between the wolf and paying off the house, as things stand today.)

But after a year, with only one significant cashflow dry spell (and it was a cashflow dry spell, not a working dry spell), I’m finally getting to the point where I instinctually trust that there will continue to be gigs, and that the wolf’s just going to have to get comfortable walking backwards down the calendar until I decide to stop pushing him. And so Matt turns out to be right: It’s a relief to know that I’m the one pushing him, and that the primary force isn’t some jackass who’s going to change his long-term business strategy and leave me high-and-dry, for reasons that have more to do with his whims and insecurities than me or my work.

Let me tell you this: Let me tell you how great it is to not have a boss. I have lots of bosses, don’t get me wrong. Each gig has a boss in the sense of someone who defines the scope and approves the deliverables. But none of the gigs have a boss in the sense of a guy who tells me where to sit, and when to sit there, and how long I can eat lunch, and what kind of computer I have to use. These days, I work for three or four hours a day in a coffee shop instead of in my office at home, and sometimes I go to the gym in the middle of the day, and sometimes I go out to lunch with my wife, and sometimes I blow off work for the afternoon and go play poker. The flip side is that some evenings I hit the work again after the kids are in bed, but you know what? A lot of the time, it’s because I want to do some work in the evening. Thing is, I like the work. After the experience of this past year, circumstances would have to get pretty bad before I was willing to have a boss again.

This is all pretty meta with respect to the general “game + story” themes and purposes of Gameplaywright. Will would certainly put this kind of writing about his career over at The Gist. For my part, cobbling a personal blog back together is one of the things that’s fallen through the cracks this past year. (Although I did start a Tumblr microblog.) But honestly, the longer that life continues on without that particular to-do item checked off, the less I’m sure that I’d do enough personal blogging to make it worthwhile. So today, I’m dropping a pretty much entirely personal post on you here, Gameplaywright reader. Thanks for reading it.

I don’t know if I ever told you that reading about you going back to full-time freelancing was one of the things that made me decide to finally get my own freelance career off the ground. I still have a part-time job, but I’m now on my fifth month of my crazy little experiment, and it’s been a great five months.

Certainly not stress-free, but it’s amazing what being in control of my work day does for me. It makes me want to work, because every time I’m working is a time I’m choosing to, not being forced to.

I’m still learning how to work, to schedule and manage myself, and how to manage the expectations of my clients. Hopefully by the time I’m at my first year, I’ll have that figured out better.

Cheers to the year, Jeff. I had no doubt that you’d make freelancing work for you.

It’s the nature of the wolf, though, that I am both swamped with work and desperate to find part-time work to get more regular money into the house. The irregularity of freelance checks comes to hurt at a time like this, when we need money more than we need the promise of money. Put another way, it’s great to know that the wolf is at your door, until the day you need to use that door to get outside. 🙂

I’m three months into my own first year (courtesy of Mongoose deciding to cut costs at the start of January). I’m finding it interesting in the Chinese curse way; I’m fine financially, but that’s more to do with inheriting my mother’s house than the volume of work, and while I’ve more than enough work, I worry about being unable to make contacts outside my existing circle of clients. It’s hard to network from the wrong side of the Atlantic.

I think I’m going to put that on the back of my business cards. Or maybe etch it on a shot glass, or beer stein.

Glad to hear that it’s been a great five months, Ryan. (Instead of having you curse my name daily for providing a debased and horrible inspiration.) It took me the better part of 10 months to get myself really organized, and in some areas, I could still stand to be moreso, on some days. “Here’s to keeping the wolf back” should become something like the freelancer’s standard drinking salute.

Cashflow is definitely the challenge, Will, innit? Definitely. My long-term strategy is to build a solid base of royalty-generating projects. Also, the couple of recurring, monthly gigs I’ve got have been critical in evening cashflow out.

I’ve managed a lot of my networking online, Gareth. Functionally, there’s been almost no difference to me between working for Brennan at Galileo (who, it occurs to me, I don’t even know what state he lives in) and working for Simon at Pelgrane in the UK. Although, I guess, convention connections at Origins and GenCon have been critical for me in the past year. If you can make either of those, I think they’ll serve you well enough for the whole year, networking-wise.

Origins and Gen Con are important networking events for me, most years. I’m hoping this year’s no different, as I’m going through considerable toil to make it to both shows — in part to see The Bones debut — and also to find new avenues of work. I get repeat business from some important quarters, but I need more avenues operating at once.

I also need part-time work in Chicago, starting in August, if anyone has any just laying around.

Well since I’m one of Jeff’s aforementioned awesome people, how can I not respond? 😉

First things first – Forbeck is indeed wise, but that is not unlike saying “water is wet” as a Game Industry truism. Matt has grappled with that wolf for many long years now, I’m certain he knows a few chokeholds at this point.

So to throw in my two bits: I did my full time stint as a freelancer for a year plus about seven years ago. I absolutely hated it. Mind you, I appreciate everything you lads have said, but it was not for me. I like the ability to pick and choose projects based on what I feel like doing. When I was a full time freelancer, I never felt like I had that luxury. Keeping the wolf from the door meant taking all offers very seriously. Unless the client was so disreputable I thought I would never get paid regardless, it was hard to say no.

p.s. Will / Jeff – you two gotta come hang with me and Blair at GenCon. We’re staying at the Embassy. Drinky, drinky.

Congratulations on both “The Bones” (very much looking forward to it) and your free-lance career.

I’ve thought about doing the computer consulting thing for quite a while but am so happy where I am that I don’t think I’ll ever do it unless the company does something radical, like going out of business.

That’s an interesting point about turning away work, TS. I can only think of one piece of work I turned away last year. The sad thing there was that I would have loved to do it, but it would have had to be done in one of Horus Heresy‘s busy months, so I had to turn it down for workload reasons.

Glad the experience has been so positive for you, Jeff. Full-time freelancing isn’t for everyone. I know of several industry friends who tried it and went back to full-time after about a year. Too unstructured. Too isolating. Too hard on the ego to have to drum up gigs all the time.

If you can deal with all that, though, it is indeed great to be your own boss, particularly if you have a supportive partner. I hate to think of all the things I would have missed doing with my wife and son, all the unusual job opportunities I would have missed out on, if I’d been tied to a “regular” job over the past 18+ years. I might consider a full-time gig again, but it’d have to be really special.

On TS’s point–actually, freelancing gets much better when you learn to say no, even if the wolf is breathing down your neck. At least that’s been my experience. It was only after I started turning down publishers for work-for-hire contracts and starting actively pitching projects that I wanted to work on, for terms I could accept and could offer as a fair deal to others, that I came to really like freelancing full-time. The rewards then outweigh the risks and the instability.